My adventures with Salesforce, Mobile and Life

mobile

If feels as if yesterday that I wrote about my Dreamforce 2016 sessions. Hard to believe that more than a year has passed by in a flash and as I write this, most Salesforce enthusiasts all over the globe are packing their bags to make the trip to San Francisco! Although I attend a lot of conferences, Dreamforce holds a special place in my heart and I’m happy that this love story will be continuing for another year.

Like last year, it’s going to a busy week ahead! Last year, I promised to myself to be more organised and better prepared for Dreamforce but the way things have turned out, I think I need to stop making promises. Here’s my tentative schedule for DF’17 this year and I hope to see you/ bump into you at some of my sessions/ engagements.

Over the years, I’ve been a big fan of virtual learning and specifically Pluralsight – as it sets a benchmark for providing high-quality content across a variety of technology and domains.

A few months back, I was approached to publish a Pluralsight course of my own and although I’m no stranger to training people on various aspects of Salesforce, I never imagined recording a course of my own and that too on a prestigious platform such as Pluralsight.

The Salesforce Mobile SDK team has been working in overdrive mode for the last few months. While I was still catching up on the changes made in 5.0 release (released in December 2016), there has been substantial work done over the last quarter and v5.1 has been released earlier this week.

For someone who’s followed the Mobile SDK since it’s early days, I believe this release is a major milestone and a massive turning point for developers as it brings several features that turn this open-source Github project into an enterprise-grade development kit. Read on to know more about what’s changed, why and how it impacts you.

I still remember the time when Appcelerator introduced the Titanium framework several years back. I was fascinated with it and kept playing around with it and helping improve it via community efforts for days, weeks and months, eventually becoming the first ever ‘Appcelerator Titan’ in India!

Since then, I’ve several fond memories of being a part of the Titanium ecosystem – becoming the organiser for Bangalore Titanium Developer Group, attending CodeStrong and last but not the least – speaking at TiConf 2014 – the leading Titanium community conference.

I’m a person with a lot of crazy ideas and I usually try and give most of those ideas a shot to see if craziness apart, I can make them happen. And no surprise, that I love super heroes as they do crazy things all the time 🙂 One of those ideas last year – was to do a mashup of Salesforce with Marvel API to build a ‘Salesforce1 Meets Avengers’ integration.

Crazily enough, Salesforce actually accepted this as one of my proposals for Dreamforce 2015 and it ranks among my favourite sessions till date. It’s been fun building this project which I call ‘Marvelforce’ and bring it to a stage where it can graduate from just an experiment to something more concrete.

And I’m looking for volunteers (Salesforce developers, Marvel fans, superhero fanboys) to take this to the next level. Read on if the details interest you so far!

Droidcon is one of my favourite technology conferences in India for several reasons – I’ve spoken at the conference for a few years, I really believe it has some of the best speakers and high-quality sessions and last but not the least – it’s organised really well.

The Force.com Mobile SDK 3.x has brought about some welcome changes such as Cocoapods support, Gradle support, Cordova update to 3.7 and many more. However, it has also meant that some things which worked perfectly in Mobile SDK 2.x no longer work. One such critical bug relates to how the image URLs are handled in Mobile SDK 3.x hybrid apps.

Read on if you are one of those hybrid developers who’s either upgraded your app from Mobile SDK 2.x or are about to do so. Continue reading →